It is due to a variety of reasons. NH has a strong gun culture. NH is one several states without laws regulating machine guns, though, strong federal regulations have been in place since 1934. People tend to have more money in NH than other states. Taxes are lower in NH than in most states. NH has the lowest poverty rate in the nation. Since people in NH make so much money and pay so little in taxes, people in NH have more money to spend on expensive machine guns than people in other states. An interesting point is that, despite NH having the most machine guns, NH has the lowest murder rate. I guess there isn’t a connection between lots of assault weapons and lots of murders.

Some speculate that it might be due to so many companies that manufacture machine guns being located in NH. NH is certainly one of the major firearm manufacturing states in the US, as is CT. However, MA is ranked #42 and it is also a major manufacturing center of firearms.

One way or another, we know many folks in NH love machine guns. One of the major 2012 fundraisers for an organization based in the most urban part of New Hampshire, the Manchester Republican Committee, was a machine gun shoot.

As the Union Leader pointed out in a recent editorial, both gun crime and crime in general is down across the country. Citing FBI data, New York University professor Patrick Egan wrote last July, “we are a less violent nation now than we’ve been in over forty years. In 2010, violent crime rates hit a low not seen since 1972; murder rates sunk to levels last experienced during the Kennedy Administration.”